Is it so Un-American to care?

The stakes don’t need to be so high for us to stand up for what’s right if we collectively decide right now that they don’t need to be.

[Photo by Jordan Esparza-Kelley]

Danaka K.

The other day I opened Instagram to pictures of a friend with his eyes beet red from pepper spray. His name is Moataz. I met him in Washington the day after Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty airman, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy. Moataz and I spent the day in Congress trying to educate staffers about a ceasefire in Gaza. It felt strange to be in D.C. then. Aaron’s death brought something of a boomerang effect to the capital, where we were seeing a fraction of the brutality experienced in Gaza for the first time. This was months ago now — I’ve since returned to Chicago where I’m encamped at my alma mater and where Moataz had been encamped at the school he currently attends. That’s where he was in the photo I saw — it was taken moments after the police stormed the George Washington University encampment and brutalized the students occupying it. Moataz, outside of being at GW, remains active in educating and protesting Congress. The days I was there and seemingly every day after, activists like him are accused of being foreign agents or working directly with terrorist groups. Sometimes by staffers, but mostly by sitting members of Congress. People in the comment section of our videos echo the smears because if the accusation is coming from someone powerful, it must be true.

I’ve seen them suggest this about Moataz, that he’s acting on behalf of someone other than himself and perhaps paid to do so . But Moataz is from Gaza City and when I met him, he had already lost over twenty family members in the Israeli assault on Gaza. That number is higher now.

The accusations of being foreign agents or affiliated with terrorist groups aren’t new or innovative accusations levied against anti-war activists — this narrative has been used since there were wars and people against them. So there are a few questions to be asked: is it so un-American for regular people (not policy makers) to care about the disastrous loss of human life? Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays Americans who care about death and destruction to do so? And lastly, how do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?

Is it so un-American to care about the loss of human life?

There have been massive resistance movements to every single war and whether politicians like it or not, many of the people who have participated have been Americans. If it’s un-American to disagree with our government then we might as well pack it all up and call it a day on this whole democracy schtick. The accusation of being foreign agents or terrorist sympathizers denies the basic trajectory of social life at this present moment. In the United States, our neighbors are truly from all over the world and humans are social animals. If we are enjoyably living our lives then we will meet our neighbors, we will become their friends, and we will care deeply for them. Friends introduce each other to other friends and we learn to care for people who live in places we have never been and never will be. There are forces that seek to squash that diversity and others that use it merely symbolically without accepting the fact that it might challenge who our country does or does not bomb. But both forces use the “foreign agent” accusation to destroy the lives of activists and squash movements into the curb until they have no teeth anymore. It’s happened over and over again.

If we move ahead with the idea that it is not inherently un-American to care about massacres, what we are left with is that the accusation is a tool to get everyone to shut the hell up about what the pigs in power are doing to our families and friends far, far away from here. Or in some cases, right here at home when university administrations call in militarized police to slam their own professors’ heads into the concrete in an attempt to get them to stop talking about the massacres our country pays for.

So, I don’t think it’s inherently un-American to care about massacres — it’s just an American expectation to get pepper sprayed or arrested for giving a fuck. And the inverse is true, it’s also quintessentially American to remain apathetic to the massacres and not utter a word about them and be awarded some temporary comfort- like no pepper spray in your eyes. If you fall into the latter category, congratulations on your pristinely unbothered eyeballs but I have some bad news for you: one day our country might do something that will anger you. Or, god forbid your children become adults who decide to care — and you or your children will become vulnerable to the same accusation and subsequent treatment — including police repression. Unless we stop reproducing this narrative about protestors at this very critical moment, disagreeing with massacres will continue to get you thrown in jail.

Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays Americans who care about death and destruction to do so?

The short answer is the American elite — the politicians and rich have a vested interest in keeping us at war. The US is the largest weapons dealer in the world and the companies that make the weapons are the biggest donors to many of our politicians. Politicians are bought and sold by the war profiteers. The ruling class has done a great job of making war a profitable industry for themselves — so they built up militarized domestic policing to protect the war industry from dissent. If the accusation of being foreign agents scared people into silence about what our country was doing to Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, why wouldn’t this repression tactic work for what’s happening in Gaza? Besides the fact that the tactic has worked in the past, there’s also a part of it that might be a telling projection: that because the elite need to get paid for their morals and opinions, maybe everyone else does too.

So, their tactic of accusing people of being terrorists or foreign agents works at repressing the masses. They’ve learned this over and over again. Can we say the same, that we’ve learned the same lesson over and over again? It appears that we cannot. But we have the opportunity to do things differently right now.

How do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes how we all view anti-war activists?

The longer we go without challenging this narrative, the longer it gets passed down to the war resisters after us. We don’t remember the U.S. wars on Vietnam or Iraq kindly — so why do we still write off the people who resisted those wars? Maybe a lot of the Vietnam War protestors were communists, but they were also right when it mattered. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the war in Vietnam now — over two million Vietnamese people were killed by our government. It is long over. It only matters if you’re right when it’s actually happening or before it happens, not when the blood is already dried on the pavement.

And as it so happens, being a communist might be the most American thing you can do as more and more people feel like everyone around them somehow got the short end of the stick. Who has the long end of the stick? We’ve never met them.

Americans happen to have their own opinions and many of us are not paid to have them — you can tell that is a fact by how few of us have healthcare. If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.

Some of us can shake these accusations off. A few months ago we all saw a photo of a young Palestinian girl with her face falling apart and her father trying to press her back together. We decided her life was worth more than any job or future opportunity we could ever lose from saying something. Her life was worth more than any threat I could ever receive — but the stakes don’t need to be so high for us to stand up for what’s right if we collectively decide right now that they don’t need to be. Power is reproduced in every single one of us — the accusations stick every time we don’t refute them on behalf of others. The accusations work every time it isn’t shot down or called out. So we must.

I am proud to be the national co-director of CODEPINK. I am called a foreign agent or terrorist sympathizer every time I post about a child being murdered in Gaza. Or when I dare suggest that the United States shouldn’t be stoking a war with China. The US and China both have nukes — I don’t have to be paid off by a foreign government to have the opinion that a confrontation between two nuclear powers would be a disaster. Also, if I was paid off by a foreign government, I probably could afford a much nicer apartment (jokes).

I don’t feel the need to say this to prove my merits for caring, but my brother is an Iraq war veteran and I think about his well-being and the one million Iraqis who were killed every single day. I am proud to be part of an organization that resisted such a disastrous war because when my brother was sent away to potentially die for Halliburton’s first quarter earnings — I was only three years old and couldn’t do it myself. When they were resisting that war, they were called terrorists too.

Last year CODEPINK was the subject of a smear campaign to discredit our work towards peace. We were accused of being funded by a deep and large web of interests that led back to the Chinese Communist Party. I am sorry to our haters and clickbait journalists, but that is just completely untrue. It is a disrespect to the fearless leadership of women in North America who don’t like to see bombs dropped on children that say “Made in the USA” and to our thousands of donors who make our work possible. And I don’t bring this up because I am bitter about it, but many people we work alongside failed to defend us out loud. Now as we all escalate for Palestine, the same accusation is coming down on each and every one of us who happens to care about the over 40,000 people that have been senselessly murdered in the last seven months. If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep — it’s really just a matter of time. If we want history to stop repeating itself, if we want to stop the senseless slaughter carried out by our government, we have to stop falling for the same tricks.

Right now, see through and directly confront what is being said about people who are taking action for Gaza. When the American elite make the inevitable pivot, and start telling you what country to hate: see through it. And when they start pointing fingers at people who think we shouldn’t go to war — ask if their accusations are actually admissions about their own integrity. You are not bought to care about Palestinian life, your comrades aren’t either.

This moment, and every moment of resistance that comes after we are gone requires us to learn this lesson and fast. The movement and the people sympathetic to it must stand up for themselves and reject the notion that it is fundamentally un-American to care about people or despise massacres.

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Originally published at

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